At Showtime, They Played Real Defense

The Lakers lined the Boston Celtics up against the wall and shot them Sunday. Finally.

The battleship finally ran down the rowboat. Russia took Kabul. Four aces beat two pair. Joe Louis knocked out King Levinsky. The 1927 Yankees won the pennant.

Magic Johnson can start to smile again. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar may play another 10 years. Pat Riley can take his tie off and let his hair dry. Larry Bird can go back to being white. Jack Nicholson can go back to playing whackos.

It’s over. It wasn’t a game, it was an execution. The Celtics should have been blindfolded. What took so long? It was such a messy application of capital punishment, any judge in the land would have commuted the Celtics’ sentence. The Celtics went out like the mad monk Rasputin. The Lakers had to try poison, shooting, choking and finally, so to speak, had to drown them in the Neva River.

Here was a team that could barely walk, led by a guy who was too white to be any good and sporting a backcourt that could fit in a Volkswagen, and the popular call before the series started was that the Lakers should win it in four games--or less--or be ashamed of themselves. Some people thought the Humane Society should ban it. It was as one-sided as bullfighting. Vegas put the spread at infinity. The Celtics looked in poor light like Bonaparte’s retreat.

The Lakers, who were supposed to run the Celtics right off the Seal Beach Pier, won the game and the championship on, of all things, defense.

The Boston Celtics didn’t score a basket for the first 4 minutes 19 seconds of the third quarter and didn’t score again until 7 minutes 47 seconds had elapsed.

The game ended to all intents and purposes at the half. The Celtics led by five, not nearly enough. The Celtics are like squirrels. They have to hoard points like nuts for the coming winter, otherwise known as the fourth quarter. They need a minimum of 15.

Basketball games, like wars, have turning points. Gettysburg, Stalingrad. The turning point in Game 6 came when the Celtics still had a one-point lead in the opening minutes of the third quarter and were driving for the basket.

James Worthy was part of a double-team operation on the Celtics’ Kevin McHale with an option to sag off on Boston guard Dennis Johnson when some instinct told him McHale was going to pass. Worthy tried to disappear.

“I didn’t want him (McHale) to see me in the path of the ball.” When McHale let it go, Worthy materialized. “I reached out to deflect it.” He had only semi-possession of it. “I felt it was going out of bounds and I felt that if I could keep it in bounds, the (24-second) clock would run down on them.”

While he was fighting to keep the ball in fair territory, he looked out of the corner of his eye and saw a familiar apparition--Magic Johnson on the way to the basket. He half-rolled, half-threw the ball to Magic who swooped on the hoop for the dunk shot that put the Lakers ahead, 57-56.

And that was the old ball game. . . .

The Celtics went quietly after that. The Lakers outscored the Celtics, 18-2, nearly 8 minutes into the period and 30-12 for the whole third period. After that, it wasn’t a game, it was a procession, a clinic in free-flow basketball. The Celtics just became the instruments for the Lakers to give a symphony. The fourth quarter was a contest only if you consider Beethoven’s Fifth a contest.

“Once you get in front of Boston, they have a hard time catching up. They play a slower game,” Laker captain Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was to observe later.

So, while the series was convincing, the outcome indisputable, it wasn’t the sweep adoring fans envisioned. It wasn’t the one-round knockout, it wasn’t 6-0, 6-0, 6-0, it wasn’t the in-your-face humiliation Laker fans were hoping for. The Lakers shouldn’t need intangibles like home-court advantages, air-conditioning, friendly atmosphere, Hollywood houses. They should have been able to beat this Celtic team on the side of Mt. Everest--in a snowstorm.

The poor Lakers are somewhat in the position of the guy who risked his life in a riptide rescuing the young child for his frantic mother--but when he brings him safely to her arms, she looks accusingly and says, “He had a hat.”

The championship had a hat on it. But it might have drowned for L.A. if it were not for the remarkable talents of a Laker who may be the best ever to play his position in this league.

With Earvin Johnson, as with Bill Russell before him, you throw away a stat sheet in evaluating his effectiveness on a basketball court. Magic just does what has to be done. Steal, dribble, shoot, pass--he handles a basketball the way a river boat gambler handles a deck of cards. Or a magician a silk hat. Some night he may turn it into a bouquet of flowers.

What you look at with Magic Johnson are championships. This is the fourth world title the team has won since Magic joined them. One of the years they didn’t, he was injured most of the year. When Kareem, for whom he caddied most of the year on court, became injured before the sixth game of the title series in his rookie year, Magic became a gunner and threw in 42 points before a startled Philadelphia figured he didn’t have to deal off the ball if he didn’t want. Magic is a one-man theater.

He adjusts. The Lakers, smelling a one-sided game, came out falling all over themselves Sunday. “We were over-anxious. We came out too ready,” explained Magic after the game. The team was like a crew of Keystone Kops who run at a door only to find it isn’t locked, and, when the Celtics so to speak threw it open on them, they crashed into one another. “We were too tight. We had to spread out, loosen up,” Magic perceived. And corrected.

The Celtics could have found out they were about to see the old rabbit-out-of-the-hat, handkerchief-into-a-flower-vase trick from Magic if they got to the Forum early. The game was not until 12:45, but shortly after 9 o’clock a figure was out on the court in plain white-wrapper T-shirt and walking shorts, weaving in and around the chorus girls practicing their routines. Magic Johnson was rehearsing his own bag of tricks, hook shots, dribble-drives, layups, stuffs, behind-the-back-passes hours before the tip-off.

It’s not the kind of dedication you expect to find in a superstar, but Magic thinks he is lucky to be on the Lakers. “This is the best team I ever played for,” he said earnestly after the game. “No question this is a super team. I never played on a team before that had everything. Each team had something you had to get around. Not this team.”

This team has everything all right. Magic Johnson. Other teams have had Mr. Clutch--or Mr. Outside or Mr. Inside. This team has Mr. Everything. And he comes with the title.